Skip a Snowy Death With Avalanche Safety School

Justin Spain helps Chris Wallwork and John Haiducek dig a snow pit in the backcountry outside Taos, New Mexico, during an avalanche safety course. If you ski the backcountry, it's only a matter of time before you're racing an avalanche. Photo: Jakob Schiller/Wired

TAOS, New Mexico — Justin Spain was frantic. His friend had just been buried by an avalanche skiing the backcountry. He needed help finding him. My partner John Haiducek and I, headed out for our own backcountry adventure, went to work.

We did our best to stay calm but quickly made a number of mistakes. I dropped my poles to concentrate on using the beacon, so I fell flat on my face when I tried to climb toward the avalanche field. It cost me time.

I also made the error of telling Haiducek to join the search. I didn’t realize the avalanche path was narrow enough to cover alone. Instead of doubling up, Haiducek needed to get his avalanche probe and shovel out so he’d be ready to pinpoint and dig. Efficiency is key and every moment counts.

Even with our mistakes, we found the guy in about 15 minutes. He’d live, but barely. According to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, an avalanche victim rescued within 15 minutes has a 90 percent chance of survival. Beyond that and the odds grow increasingly slim.

That made me thankful the whole episode had been an exercise. The “victim” was a buried beacon, and finding it was a test during the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education avalanche class.

I spend a lot of time skiing the backcountry, and anyone who ventures beyond the boundaries of a ski area knows it’s a only a matter of time before you’re caught in an avalanche. There have been an average of 25 avalanche deaths annually in the United States during the past 10 years; 34 people died last season and there have already been three deaths this winter.

Avalanche safety classes are offered across the country, and anyone who calls himself a backcountry skier ought to take one. The only way to stay safe is to stay out of trouble, a mantra repeatedly driven home by Spain and his boss Marc Beverly who leads Beverly Mountain Guides, an international guiding and education outfit in Albuquerque.

These guys have skied backcountry around the world and know their stuff. Spain is an AIARE 1 avalanche instructor and mountain guide. Beverly is an internationally licensed mountain guide certified in rock, alpine and ski mountaineering. They have no problem tackling terrain so steep you have to rappel to get there. But they’re also constantly aware of their limits, and happy to sit by the fire drinking beer when the snow conditions aren’t right.

The AIARE 1 class I took included 24 hours of instruction, and we spent 10 hours one day finding beacons, digging snow pits and learning how to read terrain. If you ski the backcountry, you’ll want to take a class. Here’s what to expect.

The Pieps DSP Tour avalanche beacon. Photo: Jakob Schiller/Wired

Gear Up

Invest in basic safety gear — avalanche shovel, avalanche probe and avalanche beacon — and get familiar with it. Pay special attention to the beacon, because it’s complicated. You’ll thank yourself for doing a little homework before class.

There are a lot of beacons out there, but it’s standard for them to have at least three antennas, which helps pinpoint your victim. The one I used, the Pieps DSP Tour, was perfect for beginners because it’s got a robust search mode yet is easier to use than its big brother, the DSP, ensuring you won’t get confused by it. Other beacons in this category include the Mammut Element Barryvox and the Ortovox 3+.

Another bit of gear people use these days is an avalanche airbag like the Mystery Ranch Blackjack. It helps you “float” atop tumbling snow. The Black Diamond AvaLung is a pack or sling that has a mouthpiece that draws fresh air from a one-way valve and dissipates CO2 through the back of the pack, preventing the victim from re-inhaling their carbon dioxide and asphyxiating.

You’ll test all this gear during class, but it’s the beacon you’ll pay the most attention to. We practiced with ours for hours before we even thought about using them in the snow.

Study Up

Read up on loose snow avalanches and slab avalanches. We most often hear about slab avalanches, which break off in sheets and wreak havoc below. The avalanche that killed three skiers in Tunnel Creek near Stevens Pass, Washington, was a slab avalanche. You’ll also hear the words “persistent slab” and “propagation.” They refer to how slab avalanches spread across, up and around areas well beyond the point where the avalanche is triggered. A slab avalanche that propagates means people standing far off to the side might still be in danger.

Familiarize yourself with the words “faceting” and “surface hoar.” These are two of the most common snow types that produce slab avalanches. There is not enough room to explain them here — the AIARE 2 avalanche class is almost entirely dedicated to studying snow types — but suffice it to say that these two kinds of snow often act like marbles under slabs of snow, allowing them to move downhill. Surface hoar, for example, is what caused the Tunnel Creek avalanche.

Expect to spend a lot of time looking for these snow layers when you dig snow pits in the field during your class. Even though the snowpack in New Mexico was fairly shallow during our class, we had the opportunity to see both faceting and surface hoar.

Expect to learn a lot about avalanche terrain. Most people think the avalanches that kill start on crazy-steep slopes. Wrong. According to the Canadian Avalanche Centre, most slab avalanches develop on slopes between 25 and 45 degrees. The sweet spot is 35 to 38 degrees. Big avalanches don’t usually form on slopes greater than 45 degrees because snow doesn’t stick together well at steep angles. It usually slides off before it can form a slab.

The most obvious terrain traps — those spots where you’re in the most danger when an avalanche is barreling toward you — include gullies, where snow can pile up quickly, and rock fields in the avalanche path. They’re called cheese graters because of what they do to the skiers dragged through them.

Terrain is one of the factors we have some power over so managing the terrain you choose to ski is crucial. We can’t control the type of snow we encounter, and we can’t control the weather, but we can control terrain by avoiding obvious problem areas.

Marc Beverly teaches us how to dig a snow pit. Photo: Jakob Schiller/Wired

Look Up

You’ll hone your observation skills. Situational awareness is a principal tenet of safe backcountry adventuring. Are you seeing other avalanches in the area? What should that tell you? How strong is the wind? Which direction is it blowing? How cold is it? By observing all the weather and environmental features you can start to build a solid understanding of the avalanche danger even before you start digging snow pits.

Planning starts well before you hit the snow by looking at weather reports and gathering initial data about what’s out there. There are also regional avalanche sites like the Colorado Avalanche Information Center that provide daily avalanche risk forecasts that are rated low, moderate, considerable, high and extreme.

You’ll learn to always have an emergency response plan, and you’ll also learn that your planning needs to be adjustable based on the conditions you encounter when you’re on the snow.

Prepare to leave the class understanding that even if you’re an avalanche expert, there are any number of human, or heuristic, factors that often make us overlook our training and force us into making bad decisions.

We’ve covered some of the most common heuristic factors in previous articles, but as an example they include things like “social proof,” which describes times when skiers believe that a piece of terrain must be safe just because they see other people skiing it. Another heuristic factor called “familiarity” describes the way skiers often believe a particular piece of terrain is always going to be safe — regardless of the conditions — because they’ve skied it numerous times in the past without incident.

One of the human factors we went over a lot in our class is called “Back to the Barn Syndrome.” Oftentimes skiers get tired after a long day in the backcountry and make poor decisions as they start to head back to their cars. They’ve spent their entire time in the backcountry being careful and figure nothing could go wrong because it’s the end of the day.

Expect to quizzed about these factors when you’re out in the field with your group. By the end of our day outside Taos Ski Valley all I could think about were how jello-y my legs felt and how good a beer was going to taste down at the lodge. But both Spain and Beverly drilled us to remember that even as we skied out, the danger was still there.